No More Innocence
by Andrea Foxx
Summary: The Princess Zelda knows that she has lost this battle. But she knows that at the end of all things, she has won a war.


AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This is supposed to be darkish. There is not a hint of romance in this romance. It's all rather grim, really. Just thought I would try something new, considering most of my stuff is squeaky-clean. Nothing graphic, but there is detailed sexuality and the confessions of a woman resigned to what path she has been made to follow. If it squicks you out slightly, good. It's supposed to, at least a little bit.

--

He was coming. He was coming that day, and I could not stop him. Not the day after. Not someday. That day. I thought it was surreal at the time. I am the avatar of perfect Wisdom, so I knew the day would come. But in my heart, I know I am young. Wisdom from myths and legends is just that. To be made real was, in truth, unreal.

I even tried to accustom myself to his appearance again.

Yes, again. He had visited one time before: years and years ago, when both of us were still ignorant to our design. He was two years older than me, yet I was taller than he was. I remembered him being a mischievous brat of a child, for even then I thought much older than I was. But that didn't stop me from feeling my age, and we were even friends for a short while. He sneaked to my room in the evening after dinner and asked me why I couldn't come play with him. I told him I was a princess. He told me he was a prince. I told him it wasn't proper. He told me proper was silly. I told him we would be caught. He told me there were ways not to be.

I knew him for ten days, before whatever dark thing that infects him took hold. We smuggled out and I wore boy's clothes for the first time, and such a romp I have never forgotten. I was five.

That day, I was twenty-five.

I feel that it is pertinent to mention my father the king passed away when I was budding woman. It is a vital detail that made this symphony of failure possible. Three kingdoms border Hyrule, none of them blessed as we are. Two have been at war for as long as anyone can remember, and the third is a theocracy shut away from outside eyes. All of that blinded their eyes to my eligibility; Hyrule is surrounded by tall, tall mountains, a desert, and an impenetrable forest. We held no promise for them, as we have no sea border, and we produce what we may thrive on and no more. Sometimes less, and that is when the Gorons and the Zora lend us their aid.

We are, after all, supposedly united.

The internal nobility clamored for my hand, but it was imperative that I remain unmastered and unspoilt, for the Cycle was due for me in this lifetime. And so I made my very first play-- I manipulated High Bishop Udonis. The church kept the hounds and their slavering jaws and muddy paws off of me. I would not marry until the goddesses produced a blessed man, for the royal blood was thinning even in those who possessed it. Until one favorable came forth, as deemed by my pawn the Bishop, none could approach me.

And so I ruled for ten long years as Princess. A limp-wristed, weak-tasting title to be sure. Unmarried, a princess is often little more than goods waiting to be sold by her father for favor or land, and to hear it at the end of official missives, at the end of laws and declarations, embarrassed me. By the Grace of Princess Zelda. Per The Princess's orders. In the Name of the Princess.

How ironic that Queen was the title I was to avoid, yet was the title that would have pleased me most.

The first thing I did that day was to travel to the tiniest parlor of the west wing. It was there his portrait hung, as if to shoo it away from the larger, grander pictures of my ancestors, of great knights through the ages. I remembered that he barely had the patience to sit still for the painter, and that he thought it was ugly afterward, even if the likeness had been nearly perfect. I tried to memorize that image, to lay over the one I would truly have to face.

The painter could only catch him with a scowl. I did not like that. The boy from my childhood smiled like no other little boy I knew. Like he had the whole world at his feet and it was his for every caper and game imaginable.

In my heart, I mourned the loss of that boy. It was more than likely the black terror from every one of my nightmares had eaten him alive.

I did not have much time to spare. Not long after, I was told a man had requested audience with me, and I knew who it was. The time it took to walk to the throne room was not nearly long enough. They would stall him long enough for me to prepare myself properly, I thought, for he had gone so far as to request an audience instead of simply storming the palace with some army plucked from the Dark Realm. I sat upon Hyrule's throne and folded my hands gently in my lap. My eyes closed. I did not want to look before I had to.

They announced The Lord Ganondorf Dragmire, King of the Gerudo to me, and the doors opened. No man dared utter another word, and I listened to the not-quite-silence in my hall. I remember it well. Footsteps, heavy but soft over the carpet. He approached with a sure measured gait, steady. Long paces. I could estimate how fast he could run from the length of his stride. His boots sounded heavy, but he managed quietly with them without any clumsy movements.

And gasps, the grinding of teeth, the creak of shifting armor. I could guess that he had not bowed, or shown any sign of deference to me. My host of guards, while they thought they were the strong and silent elite, betrayed their anger more than they knew.

I did not bid him welcome. I knew what he had come for.

He spoke and it tore me apart, clear, rich, black. Behind solemn closed eyes, he cut me to the _bone_. What immortal hand had crafted his voice, I cannot say. Never have any words have been so vicious, so bitter, so toothsome, so terrible to my ear.

I gazed upon him at last, and he was awful in every sense of the word. Men forget the true meaning of it, that it is not merely fearsome but awe-inspiring and almighty. The portrait I held in my man split apart and was shredded as so much paper, unreal and distant. How such dreadful majesty could come from such a seed, I do not know. To say the boy had grown would be a gross mockery of the truth.

The boy had burst asunder, transformed, had burned and from the ashes this demon had sprang forth; height shooting up to clear any of my guard easily by a head and a half, shoulders broadening under heavy armor he bore as if to fill it with hard flesh. His body had twisted with iron, even then almost bulging through his clothes. I could not have clasped hands around his girth, it was so thick with steel muscle; I could not have found a rerebrace forged by any blacksmith in my kingdom that would have encircled the awesome width of his arms.

That was not the worst of it however. Any brute could have wandered into my halls, but this was no brute. This was a man garbed in dark silks and blackened steel, yet wore the steel without even the smallest discomfort. And even that unnaturalness was as nothing when compared to his face.

He smiled at me, and it chilled me that it was still the smile I remembered. It was an arrow to me, coated in thick, sweet honey in the stead of venom.

He told me to order my archers to stand down: so sugar-damned yet so compelling. He claimed that anything they could manage would not do so much as a scratch. I believed him.

I am sure his effect on me is singular, as any other beauty of the old court would have thought the man as horrid as any monster on earth. But they had not the shame of seeing him through my eyes, eyes that had known his face before and could find it had lost nothing with time: merely gained. The appeal of such an exotic difference of taste is something I cannot explain. I will say it was an alarming weapon against me at the time: one contained in the rich bronzes of his skin, the fire-shock of his hair that I can only call a lion's mane. And most powerful of all was his gaze: a golden hunger in his eyes that poured over me. Rebellions and unrest I am able to fight. Eyes I cannot.

I raised a hand, and the five bowmen that had trained on him from the upper gallery withdrew. I instructed my guards to leave. And then, there, in the throne room he had claimed and lost so many times before, we fought.

It was closer than I am sure I thought at the time, for the battle was fierce and he was relentless. There were many times that I came close to killing him, and he approached the same with me.

But at the end of that day, I lay defeated and broken, and he had won. His domination was obvious, and the kingdom was his, and even with Wisdom I could not best him. I had come close. So close. But I had not won, which was all that mattered.

And the killing blow came from that fever-inducing voice, not from the edge of his blade. He held aloft the proof of his divinity high and turned my own words against me. My high bishop could not contest his claim to me, having already been waiting for a blessed man for ten long years. Wielding Din's Power, there was little I could do once he had beaten me physically but endure the uncomfortable state wedding. The only diversion was the kiss at the end, which to my shame pleased parts of me I had previously never known.

And that was the end of the longest day of my life. And how it has been branded into my mind, though spare years have passed.

Thus began the long, long torment of waiting. Every day I would call out to the Hero, and every day Courage would not answer. I refused my King, and stood fast as stone for months. Into a year, I waited, and waited, and waited. And he did not come. Still, I did not give up. Somewhere, out there, there was a hero to rescue me.

He still has not come for me. And what would he rescue me from now? What would he have rescued me from, then? Ganondorf was by my own error rightful king of Hyrule, and after the horrid battle he had not laid as much as a finger on me. After the wedding ceremony, he had spoken few words to me. Only ever to go to my door and ask of my company. Day after day, he asked.

And eventually, I accepted it. I have since lost faith in the Hero in this cycle, and it is my prayer that it never happens again. In that first night, he did not even come within arm's reach of me. We merely spoke. For weeks afterward, we spoke.

As I feared, the boy I knew no longer was. He had long since became a man, a man that was frighteningly not as monstrous as that first impression struck to me. He betrayed the truth behind this age's Gerudo, and why they had vanished without a trace. They had been a wish of the Triforce, and once he had gained Power as was his destiny, they had blown away with the harsh winds: ever only an illusion. Where Courage was, he did not know.

And that was why he sought me. He deigned to try every method he knew to remove Wisdom from me. But the Royal Blood is thinning, and while I hold the relic, it was bound to me, not to the magic that ran through my line as of old. He could not remove it, and after that I did not see him again for a very long time. He let me keep the affairs of my country. He smote my enemies, our warring neighbors that had endeavored to turn against us, without mercy. In that way, we are equal in power on this throne. However that managed to be.

No matter how horrid he was, I knew, any state marriage would be the same, or worse. And this man, I wonder about even now. Would others really have been better than this? For my situation, I was willing to do anything to drive his mind away from torture and murder of me or my people. And so I told him of darkness, of my fears, of my hopes, of my pain. Down to the detail. He snapped it up like a starving beast, demanded more. I grew in his mind, and I let his curiosity and want of occupation consume him. I fill his thoughts, his compulsions, his motivations. For the lack of his prize, I presented him with another and he took it greedily.

Part of me finds that satisfying. Part of me is disgusted. However I manage to love him, and however he manages to love me, I am not sure it is entirely healthy. But regardless of the means, the end is the same. We share something, however twisted and perverse it is. There is no going back.

I lie in his bed every night. It would be an untruth to say his great form against mine is uncomfortable. He has had his way with me many, many times. I have lost count for that each encounter the memory of the last is driven out of my mind with the sweet glory of the present. The first time he was tender with me and it was painful and short, despite the pleasures he introduced to me. As the years have wound on, he has taken me for hours at a time, with a carnal roughness that even now I hunger for.

His lust is limitless, and I fear he has trained my limits to try even him. However gentlemanly he may be, in an amorous mood he would likely take me anywhere I stood, not even wanting for a bed. It is all I can do to satisfy him, and as time has passed I have learned how to do just that: to satisfy the insatiable. It is an unholy thing to make the King of Evil squirm beneath my grasp, yet I have done so many times. Every night he takes me he boasts of my increasing satisfaction, and I fear he is right. My appetite has grown to meet his, and I am sure we have forgotten which of us has broken the other, and where love and lust begin and end.

I have gone mad. The want in his eyes drives me. He wants me, completely, utterly. And I am his, yet I do not protest. The day I began to take arousal from such a fell thing was a dark day indeed. Though all I can think about was the satisfaction of it.

As I pen this, I will not have him for a while yet, and a part of me is tortured. This note sits on my desk, where I arrange all my papers of state, to be sealed and hidden away as a warning for a future Zelda. I do not want her to become me, no matter what superficial happiness I have found. This time was a lucky one. The next may not be so.

I am growing great with child. It took a very long time for it to be so. It seems it is difficult for my husband to seed me, our blood being incompatible. Out of hundreds of nights, only one thus far has been true. But it has happened, and will soon bear fruit. The King of Evil's first child by the line of Hyrule. I am very close, I expect; there is no dress I own that is able to fit me anymore. Ganondorf has found a new place behind me as of late, and he will wind his arms around me and cradle the child within me and grin like the unspeakably awful madman he is.

For he knows what he has done. He has defiled the bloodline of the Royal Family with his progeny, put a little bit of himself into all others who would come after me. His seed may produce sons; it is the Gerudo women who were cursed to mother naught but girls save for once every century. Daughter or otherwise, this child I carry is his mark upon my line, his final conquest over the country that so long ago robbed him of his people. The babe is his victory, and I am his prize. I expect this conception might be the first of many, with time.

But he is my husband, and I have been so twisted as to love him with every burned-black fiber of my heart. And this is my child, and I will love it be it prince or princess. For my country is safe. The King of Evil is the naked steel of my sword, and I am the velvet grip upon the hilt, and Hyrule yet does prosper under the union of our rule.

Take hope. I have won in the end, whether he believes it or not. With luck, my triumph will be remembered. If that is not so, there will always be a testament to this success.

For the next Zelda, and many Zeldas henceforth, shall bear hair of flames, and fierce eyes of the sun.


End file.
